Category Archives: IT Architecture

Doris Kearns Goodwin on Leadership

Doris Kearns Goodwin opened the EDUCAUSE general meeting this morning, recounting her years as an intern in the Johnson White House and talking about Abraham Lincoln. She received a standing ovation at the end of her talk – the first that I have ever seen at EDUCAUSE.

Her talk was full of great stories from her time as an intern along with stories from Abraham Lincoln’s and Johnson’s life. She brings great humor to her subject and the ability to reflect historical facts against current events and current issues.

She recounted her list of leadership qualities that she learned from researching Lincoln:

  1. Listen to disparate opinions. Allow debate but once a decision has been made, move on. Seeking consensus can be disabling.
  2. Learn on the job. Learn from mistakes.
  3. Share credit for success.
  4. Shoulder the blame for your subordinates.
  5. Set deadlines for action.
  6. Lincoln wrote hot letters that he would not send. He would vent his anger but not act on it.
  7. Possessed the strength to adhere to his fundamental goals.
  8. Know how to relax and re-energize yourself.
  9. Managed by walking around. Lincoln visited the troops in the field.

At the end of her talk, I instantly put her new book in my Wish List. I wonder if there was a mini-rush on the book at Amazon.

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Fishing Lessons and I.T. Leadership

Chris Holsman wrote an article on I.T. Leadership traits for our internal newsletter. One part struck me as a lesson that has been hard for me to learn…

A third leadership trait I’ve cultivated is to fish where the fish are, not where they aren’t. This seems obvious but I find it astonishing how many of us (including me) spend much of our time pursuing objectives that don’t align with those of our organization or our customers.

This has a different variation for me as an Architect. For me, it is to fish where the fish are actually catchable. There are lots of projects or “improvements” that I see that are not attainable. The are out of reach for technical reasons (when we first started our SOA initiative many of our apps and the standards weren’t mature enough), for cultural reasons or budgetary reasons.

It has taken me several years to really learn to pick my fishing spots. I have had to learn to walk away from projects where I will have very little input or impact for a lot of effort needed. I have also had to let go of certain ideals because they need the organization to be more “mature” or “strategically aligned” or different in another way.

It is interestingly circular: I need to apply leadership to my own time. I need to figure out how to use my effort in a strategic way. I do this with projects and technologies – figure out how to use them strategically in enterprise. I guess I also had to learn how to do this to myself and my time.

One of my first meetings with Chris when he took the Director of EIS position was to talk about the fact that I had 28 projects on my radar. I knew I could only really work on two or three and track two or three others. He was great about the issue and let me talk myself through it. I guess that was my first fishing lesson from Chris.

ADDENDUM:

I was talking my good friend Richard about this lesson. He also mentioned that you need to work with people you like and respect. When I think about the projects that I enjoy, it is because I also enjoy the people on the team. Those people I enjoy working with are those who are open-minded, creative, energetic, cheerful, collaborative and positive. These aspects also make them more open to creative solutions.

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ETech used Twitter as a commons

I stumbled on this at Twitter: http://twitter.com/etech

Wonder how that worked?

Sounds like you could enter comments on the eTech conference in Twitter and they would aggregate them. Might be an interesting way to gather up quick notes from conferences.

Why don’t calendars do time zones?

My laptop and my palm both understand Time Zones. I understand Time Zones. Why don’t my calendar applications (Oracle’s Calendar and the Palm Calendar in the handheld) understand Time Zones. What I want:

(1) When I create an appointment I should be able to mark the Time Zone for the appointment. I should also be able to make appointments that are Time Zone neutral – not tied to a Time Zone.
(2) My clients (Palm and Desktop and Web) should all understand Time Zones and should be able to shift the alarms to compensate for my changes in Time Zone.

How would I use this? Well…

– If I get an invite to join a conference call at 11AM EST, I could just enter that time without adjusting for my local time zone. Same with UTC time.
– If I changed time zones (say fly from Madison to San Francisco), my alarms would change to be appropriate. As it is now, if I fly to California, I need to keep track of the fact that the 10AM meeting is really a 10AM Central time so I need to set an alarm 2 hours earlier.
– But I can’t do a global change because some things might be dinners in California so they need to stay on Pacific time.

We have these bright machines that understand our location and time zones. This is the perfect task to offload to these systems. It is simple and fussy and requires sifting through events and applying rules. Perfect work for a computer.

Getting ready to Present – a lot.

I’m getting ready to head out for my various meetings and presentations. I have just had another session added to EDUCAUSE – a joint presentation with Tom Barton of U. Chicago on Identity Management and Governance issues. I’m also presenting with Michael Gettes of Duke University on Identity Management and the work that Internet2 and the NSF Middleware Initiative are doing. Michael and Tom are both a kick so that sessions should be entertaining as well. It will be good to be through the next couple of weeks though. My schedule is pretty packed and things keep filling in the holes that I do have.

I guess this is what I get. When I first started working here at UW-Madison, I wished that I would get to present at these national meetings not just attend. My fairy goddog (I’m sure I have a goddog not a godmother) must have been watching and she waived her magic tail. Now I’m off to present at the Wisconsin Higher Education PeopleSoft User’s Group (WHEPSUG) on Wednesday, the CIO Council on Thursday, eInfrastructure on Friday and three times at EDUCAUSE next week. Six presentations in two weeks – that should keep me busy.

Oh, and they don’t have a hotel room for me at EDUCAUSE… yet.

Wheee.

– Jim

Sleepless Presentation Planning

I woke up last night at 1:30 AM with my mind suddenly racing over all of the presentations that I have to give. I was wide awake all of sudden thinking,”Okay. How many presentations am I giving in the next couple of weeks and am I ready for them?” This was literally the first question into my mind upon waking. I had to go through and list them all and match them to slide decks (Keynote slides that I have) or demos or white board exercises. I laid in bed and went through the list just like below

> Let’s see:
>
* Tomorrow I have the demo for the Tech Directors and I’m ready,
* Next Tuesday I have the Service Oriented Architecture Migration Strategy, I’m mostly ready though I should look through that deck once more;
* Thursday is the CIO Council presentation – that is a white board explanation and I’ve got that down,
* Friday is the demo for the eInfrastructure meeting and I have that down,
* A week from Wednesday, that is the Folksonomy talk at EDUCAUSE – I’ve got that down,
* Also that day is the Internet2 Identity Managment talk – I need to talk to Keith about that slide deck but I know the stuff in general
* Then there is the Wisconsin Digital Summit – when is that? I have the slides I need
* There is the SOA Summit – I have those slides prepared.
>
> Are there any more coming up? I think that it is. I feel like I’m missing one. What could it be? Should I get up and look at my calendar and see if there are any others out there I’m forgetting? No, I think that it is.

As you can see, work is busy and bit hectic and scattered. Most of these talks are over the next 2 weeks on four different topics. It doesn’t help much when I’m running on half a night’s sleep. What’s amazing is that my schedule will fling me through to the end of October. From there, it is a rush on through Thanksgiving, Hanukah, Christmas, New Years. When I look at the schedule of things above I suddenly see January peering over the edge of the horizon coming at me quickly.

Here is to a good night’s sleep.

– jjp